We must first recognize that what a town or building is, is governed, above all, by what is happening there. [...] Those of us who are concerned with buildings tend to forget too easily that all the life and soul of a place, all of our experiences there, depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the patterns of events which we experience there.

- Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, p62

Software is not about code, it’s about experiences. It’s about people doing things. Your software should serve as a backdrop to this, an enabler and a force multiplier. But keep in mind that software is never the center of the show.

Stop thinking about your product in terms of code, in terms of technology and features. Instead, your software is stories, it’s actions and people doing stuff. If you haven’t got people doing stuff, then you don’t actually have software, just a bunch of bytes sitting on a server. When people change the stuff they’re doing, your software has changed.

As a designer, you need to be always mindful that you’re designing spaces, it’s up to the users to inhabit them.

One big difference between traditional and social software is that user hostile interaction is a possible optimizing solution in social software. When should it occur? When the making it more inconvenient for one person makes it better for others. Paradoxically, the “others” also includes the person themself through wierd theory of mind machinations.

A workable analogy: traditional software is entities, social software is markets, user hostile interaction is arbitrage.

Each user adds “value” to your site but every user adds different amounts of value. Some users (trolls, spammers etc.) even add negative value. If we plotted out a histogram of value, what would it look like? The shape of this histogram has implications for the buildup strategy.

It should be a long tail distribution of some kind but what’s the specifics of the shape? More specifically, should we focus on eyeballs or community? If top participants are many thousands of times more valuable than average, then you can get away with exclusivity, snubbing and user hostile interactions.If the bulk of your value comes from the tail, then you want to be promiscuous and accepting.

If the ends of the tail carry significant negative value (trolls and spammers can do disproportionate amounts of damage to a community) then you need to worry about heavy duty screening mechanisms. If not, then you don’t.

Is there any way to measure this? Automatically?

Complicating things is that each user does not contribute independant value. Some of the value of low quality contributers comes from their ability to make a site more enticing for high value contributors.

In the end, it boils down to: Are user hostile interactions ever useful? if so, when?

Interesting idea from Slate. The reason we spend so much time on crap on the web is not due to boredom, it’s the desire to accumulate social currency. This provides a good model for how to draw more attention to your website.

How does it explain the time people spend on flash game sites though?

What’s needed for social currency?

A basic model for social currency:

For me to make an successfully “sell” you information, I need:

1. For me to know it

2. For me to know you don’t know it

3. For me to know you’re interested in knowing it

4. Basic reciprocity relationship established.

A basic model for attempting to engage is that 2 * 3 * 4 has to be high enough. Thus, any means of increasing 2, 3, 4 would increase the capital value of your site.

2: Make it exclusive, obscure… this is why bands have “sold out” when they become popular. The fan is reacting to the debasement of their currency

3: Good content, duh!

4: Is there much we can do here?

This seems the wrong way to think about it. Need to mull over more exactly what attention in exchange for currency really means…

You want to invite a friend, you’re more motivated to get them on the site then they are. Why not minimize the hassle by prefilling in their profile for them as much as possible. Possibly socially awkward in social settings, testing the boundaries of the relationship. But might work better for enterprise where there’s already the subordinate(secratary) role.

sketches is an experiment in a new type of blog. Each post is a work in progress, a sketch of an idea. Sketches are constantly bumped to the top as new ideas are added. Can this chaotic form of blogging work? Who knows.

I’ve posted this before in various venues but I thought it was worth a revisit:

So there’s been a lot of talk in the last few years of “food miles”, eating locally and 100 mile diets. Some of the supposed benifits of eating locally is that you become more in tune with the seasons, you support your local community, you eat fresher food and just general all round feel goodness. Now all of these are valid claims and I am not disputing any of them. But the chief claim that the “food mile” movement is making is that eating locally helps the environment through lowering the use of oil. On the face of it, this sounds fairly intuitive but I wasn’t convinced so I decided to dig a bit further and try and answer the question does the choice to eat locally decrease the amount of carbon emitted and it seems like the answer is no.

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Biofuels have taken off in the last year as prices for oil have soared and corn lobbies have realised another clever gig. Predictably, food prices have soared in conjunction and the media is filled with baffled reporters raking in the easy dough producing sappy human interest pieces. But, seriously… who couldn’t have predicted this would happen?

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So I finally broke down and got an iPhone today and I have to say, so far, I’m not enormously impressed with the fit and finish of the user interface. This being my very first Apple product, I really didn’t know what were reasonable expectations but Apple has built it’s brand on producing polished, solid interfaces.

Don’t get me wrong, the interface is gorgeous and has a lot of cool tricks but there’s certain areas where the underlying lack of care shone through. The problems started from the moment after unboxing when registering for the very first time. iTunes software is required for registration but nothing was provided in the box. Downloading it was a trivial task for me but it was still an annoyance to have to download it.

Right at the *very* start of the registration process, there’s a series of relatively technical and fairly unimportant questions which really, I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to answer and making me do that up front is just plain bad UI design. On the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively minor thing but first impressions count for a lot and, IMHO, Apple dropped the ball on this one.